‘Socrates’ as a Prophet

by Damien F. Mackey I put ‘Socrates’ in inverted commas here because I suspect that he, as is the case with the Prophet ‘Mohammed’, had no real historical existence, but is basically a biblical composite. Based on Hebrew Old Testament For the substance of this article to be fully appreciated, one needs to be aware of the essential thrust of (but preferably to have read) my article: Re-Orienting to Zion the History of Ancient Philosophy (5) Re-Orienting to Zion the History of Ancient Philosophy basing myself on the Fathers of the Church who had “appreciated at least the seminal impact that the Hebrews had had upon Greco-Roman thinking, though without their having taken the extra step that I took there of actually recognising the most famous early western (supposedly) philosophers as being originally Hebrew”. And, for ‘Mohammed’, see e.g. my article: Biography of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad) Seriously Mangles History (5) Biography of the Prophet Mohammed (Muhammad) Seriously Mangles History In the first of these articles, “Re-Orienting to Zion …”, I had made so bold as to re-identify several of the most prominent pre-Socratic philosophers, in their true origins, as Israelites (Hebrews). For instance, Pythagoras as Joseph of the Book of Genesis (who was, in turn, the genius Imhotep of 3rd dynasty Egyptian history). The matter could not be left there with the pre-Socratics, though, for as I stated (emphasis added): My purpose in this article will be to try to restore the original in relation to [certain pre-Socratic philosophers] {leaving aside at this stage the more important Socratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, whose proper identities will really need to be established}, and thereby to uncover the original artisans of wisdom, giving the precedence to Hebrew Hochmah (Wisdom) over Greek Sophia (from whence we get our word philosophy). The Socratics In other words, to complete this radical work of historico-philosophical re-orientation, one would need to be able to mount a case also for that most famous trinity of ‘Greek’ philosophy, SOCRATES, PLATO AND ARISTOTLE, to have been, originally, famous biblical characters. My argument here will be that the ‘Socrates’ of whom we now know may have arisen largely from a combination of famous Old Testament characters, prophets in fact - though also including some New Testament influence. And this is what I have found also to have been the case with ‘Mohammed’, who, however, has been mysteriously projected into presumed AD ‘time’. Regarding ‘Mohammed’ as a composite mix of famous historical persons, I have previously written: … something is seriously wrong with many aspects of the received AD history. I, trying to make some sense of this, looking to find a reliable golden thread, so to speak – and especially interested in the case of Mohammed who had begun to seem to me like something of a composite Israelite (or Jewish) holy man (traces there of Moses; Tobit; Job; Jeremiah; and Jesus Christ) – nearly fell off my chair when I read for the first time that there was a “Nehemiah” contemporaneous with the Prophet Mohammed. OK, no big deal with that, insofar as there are, even today, people named “Nehemiah”. But a “Nehemiah” doing just what the biblical Nehemiah had done? …. ‘Socrates’ is also, as I shall be arguing along most similar lines, a composite figure of notable Israelites (Jews). Presumed Era The era in which ‘Socrates’ is thought to have emerged pertains to c. 600-300 BC, known as “The Axial Age”. It is thought to have been a time of some very original characters and religio-philosophical founding fathers: Socrates, Confucius, Buddha and Zoroaster. Era of ‘Socrates’ The era of history in which Jeremiah, Daniel (prophets) and, supposedly, ‘Socrates’, emerge, pertains to the most active phase (c. 600-300 BC) of what is known as “The Axial Age”. This age has been defined as, e.g. http://history-and-evolution.com/LFM/ch1_page2.htm “… the enigmatic synchronous emergence of cultural innovations and advances across Eurasia in the period of the Classical Greeks and early Romans, the Prophets of Israel, the era of the Upanishads and Buddhism in India, and Confucius in China”. It is my contention, however, that this cultural phenomenon was basically the fructifying scattering of Israelite wisdom (Yahwism), permeating both east and west due to disruption caused by wars and exiles, but especially as a result of the Babylonian Captivity (c. 600 BC, conventional dating) at the time of great sapiential minds such as the prophets Jeremiah and Daniel. The conventional dates for Jeremiah are c. 650-570 BC. Those for Socrates are, in round figures, c. 470-400 BC. {These figures will probably need to be lowered significantly once a full revision of Persian and Greco-Roman history has been achieved} But we learned in “Re-Orienting to Zion …” just how flimsy are the facts and dates pertaining to the so-called Greek (Ionian) philosophers. And indeed there is an ancient tradition that Plato (c. 430-350 BC, conventional dating), the disciple of Socrates, had encountered the prophet Jeremiah in Egypt. Thus Saint Ambrose (Ep. 34) suggested that Plato was educated in Hebraïc letters in Egypt by Jeremiah. And along similar lines we read of a Jewish tradition, in Galus Unechama http://parsha.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/yirmeyahu-and-plato-but-not-in-egypt.html When Jeremiah returned to Jerusalem from the Babylonian exile and saw the ruins of the Holy Temple, he fell on the wood and stones, weeping bitterly. At that moment, the renowned philosopher Plato passed by and saw this. He stopped and inquired, "Who is that crying over there?" "A Jewish sage," they replied. So he approached Jeremiah and asked, "They say you are a sage. Why, then, are you crying over wood and stones?" Jeremiah answered, "They say of you that you are a great philosopher. Do you have any philosophical questions that need answering? "I do," admitted Plato, "but I don't think there is anyone who can answer them for me." "Ask," said Jeremiah, "and I will answer them for you." Plato proceeded to pose the questions that even he had no answers for, and Jeremiah answered them all without hesitation. Asked the astonished Plato, "Where did you learn such great wisdom?" "From these wood and stones," the prophet replied. One difference in this English story is that Plato also asked what the purpose was for crying about the past, and Yirmeyahu [Jeremiah] replies that this is a very deep matter which Plato will not succeed in understanding, for only a Jew is able to understand the depth of the matter of crying about the past. …. [End of quote] Whilst, however, from a comparison of the above conventional dates, it would have been quite impossible for Plato to have met, and been taught by, the prophet Jeremiah, I suspect that the story actually holds some truth. That Plato really was a younger contemporary of Jeremiah, who, interestingly, was in Egypt with the younger Baruch, his scribe. Baruch, in turn, is thought by some to have been the famous ‘eastern’ prophet Zoroaster himself (possibly, then, another of those “Axial” connections). Thus: “The Arabic-Christian legends identify [the biblical] Baruch with the eastern sage, Zoroaster, and give much information concerning him”. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2562-baruch Eusebius of Caesarea, moreover, believed that Plato had been enlightened by God and was in agreement with Moses: http://www.gospeltruth.net/gkphilo.htm Anyway, such legends open up some intriguing possibilities for the identification of Plato, too, as a (probably composite, as well) Israelite sage. And that, in turn, would relieve the following sorts of tensions with which the likes of Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian had had to grapple regarding Plato: “According to Clement [of Alexandria], Plato plagiarized revelation from the Hebrews; this gave the Athenian’s highest ideas a flavor of divine authority in the estimation of Clement”. (http://www.gospeltruth.net/gkphilo.htm). Tertullian: “… free Jerusalem from Athens and the church of Christ from the Academy of Plato”. (De praescriptione, vii) To be able to confirm Socrates and Plato (and perhaps Aristotle as well) as originally biblical characters, would also serve to relieve tensions relating to the supposed pagan Greek (with all of its corruptions, e.g. pederasty) foundations of much of Christian philosophy (e.g. Thomism). A Composite Figure Was ‘Socrates’ a prophet? The question may not be as silly as it might at first appear. The Evolution of ‘Socrates’ Though the prototypal Socrates, and indeed Mohammed, are (according to my view) composites, based chiefly upon persons belonging to the previously mentioned “Axial Age”, in which era the conventional Socrates, but not Mohammed, is considered to have existed, ‘they’ underwent a considerable literary-historical evolution, thereby picking up aspects of other characters and eras not truly belonging to ‘them’. Striking Christian aspects, for instance, such as the Prophet Mohammed’s supposed ascension from Jerusalem into the seventh heaven. Frequent claims that Mohammed copied from Judaïsm and Christianity - such as e.g. the Christian Apocryphal source “The Infancy Gospel” and Gnostic Christians about the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ - would need to be modified substantially, according to my reconstructions, so as not to include the “Axial Age” ‘Mohammed’ as a copier - since ‘he’ was originally, anyway, a composite of BC Israel. No, these borrowings from Christianity must have occurred instead, I believe, during the long evolution of the system known today as ‘Islam’. Likenesses to Hebrew Holy Men Socrates and Jeremiah were alike in many ways. Both, called to special work by oracular or divine power, reacted with great humility and self-distrust. And, whenever Socrates or Jeremiah encountered any who would smugly claim to have been well instructed, and who would boast of their own sufficiency, they never failed to chastise the vanity of such persons. Again, the Book of Jeremiah can at times employ a method of teaching known as ‘Socratic’: “Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah, saying, Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for me?” - Jeremiah 32:26, 27. THIS method of questioning the person to be instructed is known to teachers as the Socratic method. Socrates was wont, not so much to state a fact, as to ask a question and draw out thoughts from those whom he taught. http://www.sermonindex.net/modules/mydownloads/scr_index.php?act=bookSermons&book=Jeremiah&page=6 Similarly in the case of Zechariah, as we read in another place, “God used what we today call the Socratic method to teach Zechariah and the readers of this book”: http://www.muslimhope.com/BibleAnswers/zech.htm The name Socrates looks to me like a Grecised version of the Hebrew name, Zechariah. And perhaps to none of the Old Testament prophets more than Jeremiah would apply the description ‘gadfly’, for which Socrates the truth-loving philosopher is so famous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_gadfly The term "gadfly" (Ancient Greek: μύωψ, mýops[1]) was used by Plato in the Apology[2] to describe Socrates's relationship of uncomfortable goad to the Athenian political scene, which he compared to a slow and dimwitted horse. The Book of Jeremiah uses a similar analogy as a political metaphor. "Egypt is a very fair heifer; the gad-fly cometh, it cometh from the north." (46:20, Darby Bible) Could this last be the actual prompt for the ‘Socratic’ gadfly concept? The Hebrew prophet Malachi has been called “the Hebrew Socrates”. Thus we read: http://www.backtothebible.org/index.php/component/option,com_devotion/qid,3/task,show/resource_no,34/ .... Although little or nothing is known of the personal life of Malachi the prophet, nonetheless he has given us one of the most interesting books in the Bible. Not only is this the last book of the Old Testament, it is also the last stern rebuke of the people of God, the last call for them to repent, and the last promise of future blessing for Israel. In Malachi's day the people had become increasingly indifferent to spiritual matters. Religion had lost its glow and many of the people had become skeptical, even cynical. The priests were unscrupulous, corrupt, and immoral. The people refused to pay their tithes and offerings to the Lord and their worship degenerated into empty formalism. While the people had strong male lambs in their flocks, they were bringing blind and lame animals to be offered on the altars of Jehovah. Malachi was commissioned by God to lash out against the laxity of the people of God. This prophecy is unique for it is a continuous discourse. In fact, Malachi has been called "the Hebrew Socrates" because he uses a style which later rhetoricians call dialectic. The whole of this prophecy is a dialogue between God and the people in which the faithfulness of God is seen in contrast to the unfaithfulness of God's people. Thus Malachi is argumentative in style and unusually bold in his attacks on the priesthood, which had become corrupt. …. [End of quote] Socrates and Jeremiah were very humane individuals - Jeremiah’s constant concern for the widow and orphan - men of profound righteousness, always trying to do all that was good for the people. Both Socrates and Jeremiah were hated for having challenged the gods of the society; Jeremiah, of course, being a loyal Yahwist. Socrates, like Jeremiah, had followers or disciples who also were inspired by him and were willing to go into exile and defy the government for him. Might not, perhaps, the Greek name ‘Socrates’, or ‘Sokrates’ (Σωκρατης) have originated with the phonetically like Hebrew name ‘Zechariah’ (זְכַרְיָה) - of which ‘Sokrates’ is a most adequate transliteration (allowing, of course, for a typically Greek ending to have replaced the typically Hebrew one)? Martyrdom But can the prophet Jeremiah also have been a martyr, as the philosopher Socrates so famously is thought to have been? There appears to be much uncertainty about how and when Jeremiah actually died. According to one tradition, the great prophet was martyred by stoning whilst an exile in Egypt: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8586-jeremiah The Christian legend (pseudo-Epiphanius, "De Vitis Prophetarum"; Basset, "Apocryphen Ethiopiens," i. 25-29), according to which Jeremiah was stoned by his compatriots in Egypt because he reproached them with their evil deeds, became known to the Jews through Ibn Yaḥya ("Shalshelet ha-Ḳabbalah," ed. princeps, p. 99b); this account of Jeremiah's martyrdom, however, may have come originally from Jewish sources. Jeremiah’s life was so full of suffering and persecution, however, that we shall discover in The Jerome Biblical Commentary (19:98), for instance, the designation of the substantial block of Jeremiah 36:1-45:5, as the “Martyrdom of Jeremiah”. Perhaps the death by martyrdom in the Old Testament (Catholic) Scriptures that most resembles that of Socrates, is that of the venerable and aged Eleazer in 2 Maccabees 6:18-31. And this may be where it becomes necessary once again to invoke our composite theory. The two accounts of martyrdom have sufficient similarities between them for the author of the apocryphal 4 Maccabees to consider Eleazer as a “New Socrates” … the archetype of the semi-voluntary intellectual martyr: he is a νομικός in the royal Court (4 Macc 5:5) … he is implicitly compared with Socrates by the metaphor of the pilot (4 Macc 7:6) … young people regard him as their “teacher” (4 Macc 9:7)”. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=4rP118zc8e4C&pg=PA119&lpg=PA119&dq George Hamann saw Socrates as a type of Jesus “Far from being an eighteenth-century rationalist, Hamann argued, Socrates was virtually a Christian believer, a prophet, even a type of Christ”. Peter J. Leithart Peter J. Leithart writes as follows about the completely unusual Enlightenment thinker, George Hamann: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/01/the-hemlock-and-the-cross In early July 1759, three friends met at an inn called the Windmill outside the German city of Königsberg, for what might be called an “evangelistic” or “counseling” session. Intellectuals all, the three friends had earlier been cobelligerents in the cause of rationalism and the Enlightenment, but one had gone apostate. He had become a Christian of the most fervent and unenlightened sort, and his friends were intent on restoring him to the true fold, Enlightenment, and the good shepherd, Reason. One of the two evangelists, Johann Christoph Berens, is long forgotten. The other was a thirty-five-year-old philosophy professor who had a few years earlier anonymously published a book on the Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, pushing Newtonian science to the conclusion that all the operations of the world could be reduced to mechanical laws: “Give me matter and I will show you how a world should arise from it.” So wrote the young, and dogmatically slumbering, Immanuel Kant. The “apostate” was Johann Georg Hamann, until recently a promising Francophile rationalist. Hamann had translated the French economists, read Voltaire and Montesquieu, and defended the merchant classes against their detractors. His outlook changed during a trip to London in 1757, the precise purpose of which is still unknown. In London, Hamann had fallen into what he later described as an “irregular” way of life, been swindled out of his money, and apparently discovered that his London host was involved in a homosexual relationship. Shocked by this revelation, sick and desperate, he moved in with a respectable family in February 1759, closed himself in with his books, including a Bible, and began to read. According to his later account, over the next few months Hamann read the Old Testament once, the New Testament twice, and then the whole Bible again. In the end, he said, “I forgot all my books in so doing; I was ashamed of ever having compared them with God’s book, of ever having placed them on the same level with it, indeed of ever having preferred another book to it. I found the unity of the divine will in the redemption of Jesus Christ; I recognized my own crimes in the history of the Jewish people; I read the record of my own life, and thanked God for His forbearance with this His people, because nothing but such an example could entitle me to such a hope.” It was a conversion that turned Hamann into the man described by Isaiah Berlin as the century’s “most passionate, consistent, extreme, and implacable enemy of the Enlightenment,” a “pioneer of antirationalism in every sphere.” Despite the meeting at the Windmill and a second meeting a few weeks later, Hamann came through the debate unscarred and unmovable. In a letter written to Kant shortly after the meeting, he expressed his bemusement “at [Berens’] choice of a philosopher to try to change my mind,” adding “I look upon the finest logical demonstration the way a sensible girl regards a love letter.” The whole exchange permanently damaged Hamann’s relations with his erstwhile patron Berens, who allegedly threatened violence, but Hamann continued corresponding with Kant for years afterward. Not long after, Kant proposed that the two collaborate on a children’s physics textbook (!), and some years later Kant helped Hamann, frequently unemployed, to obtain a job. Hamann, for his part, wrote an eccentric response to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason whose trenchant insight into the problems of Kantianism has only recently begun to be recognized. At their initial meeting, Kant had suggested that Hamann should translate some articles from the French Encyclopedia as a kind of therapy. Instead, Hamann wrote the letter to Kant that was to become one of the most famous letters in German intellectual history, and followed with a published response entitled Socratic Memorabilia, dedicated to “the two.” (For what it was worth, “the two” were not impressed, and Hamann suspected that they were behind an attack review published in a Hamburg journal.) In part, the treatise continued the highly dramatized self-defense begun in Hamann’s letter to Kant. Placing himself in the position of Socrates, he implicitly positioned Kant and Berens as enforcers of orthodoxy, or, worse, as shrewish Xanthippes. A servant of the truth, Hamann knew that he could expect nothing better than “hunger and thirst . . . the gallows and the wheel.” More broadly, the Socratic Memorabilia was Hamann’s effort to turn one of the Enlightenment’s own idols - indeed, the patron saint of the eighteenth century - against the Enlightenment. Some, such as Joseph Priestly, who wrote a treatise on Socrates and Jesus Compared, insisted on the superiority of Jesus. For many, however, Socrates was a weapon to be used against Christianity; like the philosophes themselves, Socrates was a free inquirer standing courageously before, and ultimately crushed beneath, the entrenched forces of intolerance, superstition, and ignorance. This time around, the philosophes hoped, things would turn out differently. Hamann was as devoted to Socrates as his friends, but his account of Socrates’ life and teaching was very different. For starters, Hamann recognized that Socrates’ philosophical “method” was not that of modern rationalists. Socrates did not intend to offer irrefutable logical demonstrations. Rather, “analogy constituted the soul of his reasoning, and he gave it irony for a body”; later in the treatise Hamann added that Socrates “preferred a mocking and humorous exhibition to a serious investigation.” Critics complained of Socrates’ “allusions, and censured the similes of his oral discourse at one time as being too farfetched and at another time as vulgar,” but such criticisms were wrongheaded. Hamann discerned a similarity between Socrates’ “poetic” mode of investigation and the parabolic shape of Christian revelation, for, as he wrote elsewhere, “the Scriptures cannot speak with us as human beings otherwise than in parables because all our knowledge is sensory, figurative.” In this introductory comment on Socratic method, Hamann already indicates that he is prepared to view Socrates, as he viewed everything else, Christocentrically. While presenting this theological perspective, Hamann’s aim was to write “about Socrates in a Socratic manner,” that is, with irony, allusion, humor, and, above all, through indirection. His success is indicated by one striking fact: Hamann wrote a treatise presenting a Christological view of Socrates without ever once naming Christ. In contrast to the hubris of modern systematizers who want to get the heavens into their heads, Socrates surpassed all other Greeks in wisdom because “he had advanced further in self-knowledge than they, and knew that he knew nothing.” In Socrates’ profession of ignorance, Hamann detected a hint of Paul’s later statement that “if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Corinthians 8:2). Socrates was an ancient evangelist who urged Athenians to turn “away from the idol-altars of their pious and politically shrewd priests to the worship of an unknown God.” Socrates’ “impetuosity” in debate with sophists and priests “compelled him to pull out his hair sometimes in the marketplace and to act as if beside himself.” That “beside himself” echoes the charge made against Jesus, but Hamann makes the analogy more explicit by adding, “Was not the teacher of mankind, gentle and lowly in heart, forced to utter one denunciation after the other of the scribes and pious ones among his people?” If anyone would deny Socrates a place among the prophets, he “must be asked who the Father of Prophets is and whether our God has not called Himself and shown Himself to be a God of the Gentiles.” Hamann finds a foreshadowing of Christ in Socrates’ notorious ugliness. Greeks, like the Jews of Jesus’ day, were “offended that the fairest of the sons of men was promised to them as a redeemer, and that a man of sorrows, full of wounds and stripes, should be the hero of their expectations.” Even the Spirit is evident in the life of Socrates. In an oblique reference to the Spirit’s role in the conception of Jesus, Hamann compares the spirit or genius that inspired Socrates to the “wind” that allowed “the womb of a pure virgin” to become fruitful. Most of all, Socrates’ relentless pursuit of truth and irritating habit of pointing out the ignorance of others led to his death, and in this he foreshadowed the life and death of Jesus. And this made it perfectly obvious that when God became man he “would not escape from the world as well as a Socrates, but would die a more ignominious and cruel death” even than Saint Louis, “the most Christian king.” Accepting the hemlock rather than submitting to exile, Socrates proved that he shared both the mission and the “final destiny of the prophets and the righteous.” Far from being an eighteenth-century rationalist, Hamann argued, Socrates was virtually a Christian believer, a prophet, even a type of Christ. …. Peter J. Leithart teaches theology and literature at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho.